My guess is that it means that not only does "Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy" write her quotes with AI without reading them carefully, but that she's also doing it with an older model.

I think it’s pretty clear if you read the rest of the sentence, which you’ve omitted: “and the fourth most powerful in the world”. If she hadn’t said “in Europe”, the whole top 3 might be in Europe as well.

I took it to mean that the controller of the most powerful computer in Europe is Europe, as opposed to Apple or Google or another private entity.

I am assuming before JUPITER the most powerful computer in Europe was not at home in Europe?

I believe this refers to the fact that, before Jupiter, the most powerful computer in Europe was HPC6, which is owned by Eni S.p.A, a private company, and the following most powerful computer was the Alps system, located in Switzerland. So, in this context, this new supercomputer is owned by Europe, “the public” and it’s located in the European Union sovereignty within Europe, the continent.

Edit: I found the full quote in the website of the Jülich Development Center and I guess it makes sense why it was editorialized for the eu-wide website.

“This is a historic milestone. With JUPITER, Europe is reaching the highest level of high-performance computing. JUPITER is also a testimony for Germany's long leadership in HPC. Today, it became the home of the most powerful computer in Europe and the fourth most powerful in the world. From European perspective, JUPITER is a pioneer. It shows that when we combine national vision with European cooperation, we can achieve global excellence.”

Source:

https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/news/archive/press-release/2025...

To quote zefrank: The tallest giraffe is taller than all other giraffes

Confusing grammar aside, the most powerful computer before this was HPC6 in Italy which is definitely in Europe.

https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2025/06/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputing_in_Europe

Maybe they wanted to say “with [JUPITER, Europe],” as in “CERN, Switzerland.” This would still be unnecessary and confusing, but that’s the most sense I can make of it.

Sounds like a dril quote.

I mean, it's a straightforward enough statement. But what was happening in Europe before..?

Quite a varied field of research. From Computer Science and Neuroscience to Climate Research and more. You can find an overview for some of the HPC systems here: https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/ias/jsc/systems/supercomputers/...

Looks like a research cluster. Universities / their Researcher can apply for reasources instead of setting up own hardware.

crack passwords?

Find websites that don’t properly handle GDPR

With 29 PB of raw and 21 PB of useable capacity.

RAID gonna RAID.

It was probably more like system designed in Europe, made in China, assembled in Europe thing.

Sure, the HQ of the core component(Nvidia) is incorporated in US but that too is a multinational effort.

Who exactly were you going to buy equipment from? AMD/Nvidia/Intel are the only players in town.

Seems like it has 5 petaflops of compute from a SiPearl (French) designed Rhea-1

Edit: that might be speculative or a future addition cause they taped out less than 2 months ago https://www.eetimes.eu/sipearl-tapes-out-rhea1-processor-clo...

Which was delayed 2 years. I’m speculating this was supposed to be mostly or exclusively this but they needed a computer now. Or needed to spend the budget now.

So US supercomputers aren’t an achievement because they just bought chips from Taiwan and those aren’t also an achievement because they bought photolithography machines from ASML in Europe?

Since when are supercomputers anything other than just the ability to afford a lot of hardware?

Germany got European taxpayers to buy them US hardware. That's a fairly normal day in the EU.

To be fair, being "just" a big Nvidia installation doesn't really mean that it's "so simple" (person you're replying to didn't claim it was simple), considering that every "Nvidia installation" has a slightly different set of factors like node count, per node memory, CPU choice, and networking configuration. All it says is, like many (most?) other modern supercomputers, it's a giant NVIDIA GPU cluster.

It might just be expensive... Some other countries might just not need those when they are struggling to get fresh water...

And so on, but that's just my 2 cents.